Chapter 101: Curtain Call Amid Applause

Yu Sheng, afraid that he would forget the long string of information he had just heard, blurted out everything he had learned, nearly biting his tongue in the middle—the whole process was barely sustained by instinct and a bit of short-term memory. But after he finished, Red Riding Hood's blank "Huh?" threw him completely off.

Fortunately, Red Riding Hood then pulled a voice recorder from her pocket...

"It's a habit of mine. You should develop it too—always carry a recording device that's on twenty-four hours a day. Don't use the Special Duty Bureau's phone; the battery life is too wasteful. A voice recorder is fine," Red Riding Hood said as she operated it. "In the Borderlands, you'll always encounter unexpected situations. Your attention isn't always reliable. Having a recording device to review at any time is very useful."

After a faint noise, the voice recorder played back the long string of content Yu Sheng had just rapidly relayed.

Red Riding Hood, Eileen, and Hu Li all looked up at the same time, their confused, surprised, and curious gazes falling on Yu Sheng.

Hu Li spoke first: "Benefactor, this is..."

"He said it," Yu Sheng said, raising his hand to point at the corpse beside him. "It spoke out of nowhere. I almost didn't react in time. Lucky my short-term memory is decent."

Eileen and Red Riding Hood were instantly horrified, while Hu Li remained carefree and looked at Yu Sheng with considerable admiration: "Benefactor's spirit communication art is truly brilliant!"

"How can you accept every weird thing! You think everything that happens to Yu Sheng is normal, don't you?" Eileen glanced at Hu Li in astonishment, then turned to Yu Sheng, her scarlet eyes wide. "What happened? Weren't you just standing by the display for a moment? When did the corpse start talking?!"

"Maybe... because I touched this?" Yu Sheng was also thinking about the issue. He looked thoughtfully at the trace of dried blood still on his fingertips. "At that moment, I suddenly saw the entire hall freeze..."

He didn't hold back and told them everything about his brief experience, including the abnormal phenomena in the hall and the eerie state of Hu Li, Eileen, and Red Riding Hood. After he finished, he curiously rubbed the bloodstain on the display again, but this time, the "speaking dead" phenomenon didn't reappear.

"Seems like it was a one-time thing," Yu Sheng muttered, rubbing his fingers. "Red Riding Hood, does this seem reasonable?"

Red Riding Hood didn't say a word, still in a state of "this is too messy, I haven't sorted it out yet."

Yu Sheng knew immediately that he didn't need her to answer. This didn't seem reasonable.

Just like many unreasonable things that happened to him, just like countless unreasonable things in this world.

The little puppet, after a moment of daze, managed to understand the situation. She hesitated and said, "I think... this shouldn't be an illusion."

"Whether it's an illusion or not, we'll find out if we go look," Yu Sheng said, pointing at the exit at the other end of the white exhibition hall. "The dead man told me the murderer discarded the Mourner Statue in the corridor."

Hu Li immediately walked toward that corridor.

Eileen quickly reminded her, "Hey, be careful. Don't trigger any traps or anything."

Hu Li thought that made sense, nodded, raised her hand, and made a strange gesture. Eight of her nine tails immediately detached from her body and flew ahead of her, surrounded by foxfire, slowly advancing like a swarm of hunter-killer drones.

She even turned to explain to Yu Sheng: "Benefactor, this is called 'Tail Control Art'..."

Yu Sheng's face twitched. He tried to keep a straight face and pretended to be serious, while sensing ahead and confirming that there were no hidden "guards" in the corridor.

Red Riding Hood still found it hard to accept the sight of the fox demon releasing a bunch of her tails to use as drones. Her eyelids twitched, and she opened her mouth several times, but in the end, she held back.

A moment later, a fox tail came back from deep in the corridor, curled around something.

It was a small white statue—a woman covering her face with both hands, crying in a strangely twisted posture.

It was exactly the original target of this "commission."

The fox girl withdrew her tail, held the small statue, and happily returned to Yu Sheng, handing it over like a trophy: "Benefactor, it was really there!"

Yu Sheng took the small sculpture, only about twenty centimeters tall. But getting the commissioned item didn't give him any sense of "complete success."

This commission, which he had originally thought would be a simple, quick find for a veteran leading a rookie, had now turned into an extremely tricky and complicated incident.

"The statue really was in the corridor... so the information you 'heard' from the dead is most likely true," Red Riding Hood said with a complicated expression as she looked at the "Mourner Statue" in Yu Sheng's hand. "I just thought about it. The 'Five Paths River' you mentioned was probably a mistake. But there is a district called 'Five Pines River' in the south of Boundary City, quite far from here... Boundary City is very large. Some districts have a different accent from the main city."

"What about the meanings of 'Assist His Descent' and 'Save the Lord from Suffering'? Can you understand them?" Yu Sheng asked curiously.

"I've never dealt with Angel Cultists—it's too dangerous for an ordinary paranormal investigator like me. Whenever we encounter any leads on them, we report them immediately and then try to stay as far away as possible," Red Riding Hood shook her head. "The Special Duty Bureau people must know more, but... I really don't recommend you look into this."

Yu Sheng frowned: "Why?"

"Because the 'Angel' that Angel Cultists worship is actually the 'Obscure Angel.' That thing you saw in the valley last time—people who worship that as a god, do you think they can be any good?"

Red Riding Hood's expression was grave as she spoke in a low voice.

"Even among all the crazy cults and extremist organizations, Angel Cultists are the most irrational bunch. Even a force like the 'Black Dot Group,' which is widely wanted in many orderly regions, has to issue wanted notices for Angel Cultists in their controlled areas. That should tell you how twisted these people are."

She paused, probably worried that Yu Sheng might not realize how dangerous those lunatics were, and quickly added: "It's not just their craziness. More importantly, they actually seem to have some connection with the 'Obscure Angel.' Dealing with them too much, the madness can spread, and even the 'Obscure Angel' might turn its gaze on you. So even the 'regular troops' responsible for exterminating Angel Cultists have to undergo strict mental evaluations and take administrative leave after every contact with them. Seriously, never get involved with this kind of group if you can avoid it."

Yu Sheng felt the seriousness of the matter from Red Riding Hood's solemn emphasis. He recalled the weird and terrifying giant eye he had seen in that valley before, and his expression turned serious: "Alright, I understand."

Red Riding Hood breathed a sigh of relief and looked around the white exhibition hall, which now seemed particularly eerie and battered.

"We should leave."

"How do we get out?" Yu Sheng asked. "Uh, I mean the normal procedure."

Before Red Riding Hood could answer, Eileen asked in confusion: "Huh? We're not just opening the door and going home?"

"Better not?" Yu Sheng's face showed some embarrassment. "It's late at night. In the Borderlands, I can't call the Special Duty Bureau to report. The alarm going off suddenly would be pretty scary. Besides, I'd like to experience the normal evacuation procedure from the Borderlands for once."

"Cough, there are only two ways to leave the museum normally," Red Riding Hood coughed lightly. "Either survive here until the 'night performance' ends, which would be the next morning in the real world, or make the 'Museum Night' have a grand 'curtain call'—make the theater ring with prolonged applause. After the applause, the performance ends early."

"Waiting for the night show to end would take too long," Yu Sheng immediately shook his head. "What does it mean to make the 'Museum Night' have a grand curtain call? What do we need to do?"

"There's no clear standard. Basically, if we treat our entire activity in the museum as a 'performance' on stage, we need to make the invisible spectators in the theater seats feel 'satisfied' or 'amazed,'" Red Riding Hood explained. "There are many ways to achieve this effect. Sometimes it triggers inexplicably—someone did an impromptu painting in the hall, someone just hummed a song, or even someone triggered applause while arguing with a teammate. The craziest case was an investigator trapped in the exhibition hall, seriously injured, who started cursing the museum in despair. Then, in the middle of his cursing, applause suddenly thundered."

Yu Sheng: "..."

So random?!

After a moment of exclamation, he turned his gaze to the little puppet that had climbed back onto his shoulder.

Eileen immediately caught on and glared ferociously (well, not really): "What are you looking at me for! Hey, that's very rude to a lady, I'm telling you. When I speak my mind, it's all heartfelt. You've got a stereotype of me..."

Yu Sheng thought that letting Eileen curse and maybe get the "audience" outside excited seemed a bit unreliable, so he looked at Red Riding Hood: "Didn't we just have a big chase battle with the 'guards'? Wasn't that exciting enough to satisfy the 'curtain call' conditions?"

"'Battle' is actually the hardest way to achieve 'curtain call' because the 'guards' are part of the museum's mechanism. Fighting them seems to be judged as a normal part of the Museum Night performance and doesn't have the effect of being 'surprising' or 'off-script,'" Red Riding Hood analyzed seriously. "As I understand it, the condition for satisfying the 'curtain call' should actually be something that 'shouldn't happen within the script of Museum Night.'"

After hearing that, Yu Sheng immediately started thinking.

This time, without Eileen prompting, Red Riding Hood also had a sudden epiphany—Yu Sheng had another idea.

Sure enough, Yu Sheng quickly said: "You just said that a skirmish with the guards is a reasonable part of the big 'script' of Museum Night, right?"

Red Riding Hood didn't know what he was thinking, just nodded blankly: "Right."

"Then what if we pulled off some huge 'art' without ever encountering the guards?"

Red Riding Hood: "...Huh?"

Yu Sheng didn't explain. He directly turned to Hu Li: "Do you have enough tail reserves?"

Hu Li nodded repeatedly: "Plenty. And I have foxfire to use—that's unlimited."

"Then good." Yu Sheng immediately smiled, looking very pleased.

Red Riding Hood found his smile a bit unsettling and finally couldn't help asking: "What exactly are you going to do?"

Yu Sheng grinned, raised his hand, and pointed at the door not far away: "See that opposite? We came from there. It's a big exhibition hall full of sculptures and antiques. Later, have Hu Li pile all her reserved tails in there. While the guards aren't here, we'll blow up a big one. If that's not enough, we'll burn down every exhibition hall along the way and collapse all the passages here..."

Red Riding Hood was dumbfounded. But what shocked her even more was that Hu Li nodded without a moment's hesitation.

Yet in the next second, before Red Riding Hood could voice her objection, before Yu Sheng could actually take any action, a sudden sound coming from all directions interrupted everyone.

The museum burst into thunderous applause.